If you’re going to make some sort of guarantee or have a marketing message, it’s very important that you say what you mean (and vice versa). When consumers go out of their way to pick your brand based on your message, you want to make sure that they get what they think they’re getting. If a customer thinks you mean one thing, and finds out it isn’t so, they won’t just be confused, they’ll be a little peeved – which can undo all the effort you’ve spent marketing the message in the first place.
Oct
20
2009
Can You Prove What You Know?
In today’s service and knowledge economies, it can be difficult to tell an expert from a newbie. If someone asks you to prove that you know what you’re talking about, can you?
Oct
14
2009
How to Find Your Customers Online
Sometimes your customers find you online by commenting on your blog or joining your Facebook fan page. But what if you’re getting started or you’re looking to find other places where your customers hang out? How do you go about finding your customers online?
Oct
08
2009
Why Don’t You Want Customers to Contact You?
Ever done a bunch of research, finally decided to get a product, gone to the website and found the only way to contact them is through a contact form? While eCommerce websites are usually pretty savvy about letting their customers contact them through multiple ways, normal businesses sometimes give off the “go away” vibe unintentionally.
Aug
12
2009
Why Your Crappy Free Wireless is Costing You Business
Many businesses, especially restaurants and coffee shops, have free wireless these days. However, many have really crappy free wireless (it’s slow or it cuts out, etc.) and that is costing them business.
Do it Well or Don’t Do it
If you’re going to have free wireless, you probably advertise it. It’s an enticement to come to your shop. It’s a reason why people have meetings or work there. If your free wireless isn’t that good, they’re not going to return when they want somewhere to meet or work and that’s lost business.
May
04
2009
Word Associations – Customer Service – What Comes to Mind?
I think we all have different images about what customer service should be. But what’s the first thing that pops into your head? I polled twitter to find out:
A lot of frustration. As @TerryBean said, a “dying art”. @mistygirlph mentioned customer experience. @damnredhead and I had a longer conversation about how non-verbal communication is often forgotten (hands in the pocket or crossed arms). I like the images @impossibleman mentions – “standing along side” and “walking them through”.
Customer service is one of those touchpoints that companies often ignore as a cost center – or if they do provide customer service, forcing the employees to follow scripts or processes instead of actually helping customers. Customer service is a huge part of the experience companies have with customers. It’s not just about after the product/service is bought. It’s beforehand, it’s during and it’s after. Customer service is about experience and reputation. Customer service impacts all business departments – marketing, PR, accounting, etc. Being dedicated to customer service and actually providing good customer service are two different things. But customer service is something that can help companies make it through a tough economy.
I had a conversation with @CharlieCurve on the phone and he mentioned the problems Twitter was having last summer where it was down for days at a time. People were frustrated but were still fighting for the brand, wanting it to make it – embracing the FailWhale. If your product or service were to have that kind of problem, how would your customers react?
Technorati tags: customer service, brand, customer experience, business, marketing strategy, marketing
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Mar
27
2009
Using Social Media to Create Great Experiences for Your Customers
Creating great experiences comes from listening, respecting and getting to know your customers. Think about a satisfying purchase experience you’ve had recently. You probably had some personal interaction with the company, they listened and were helpful in guiding your purchase decision. You felt like they really understood your needs and what you were trying to do. Many of us no longer have in-person interactions with our customers, but we can still use social media to accomplish many of the same touchpoints.
- Listen – Join social networks where your customers are. Listen to what they are saying, both in general and about your company. You’ll gain insight into what your customers really think and what their needs are.
- Help – Help your customers anyway you can. Advice and assistance, even if they are not related to your products will be appreciated and will help build trust.
- Build a Relationship – Reach out to your customers. Say hello. Have a personality. Have conversations.
- Respect – Don’t shout at your customers. Don’t spam them. Don’t send them uninvited email or advertising. This can be difficult, but asking your customers to take action occasionally is different than bombarding them with marketing.
You’ll find that once you have built relationships with your customers it is much easier to understand what they need and want out of your products. You’ll spend less time with inefficient marketing and advertising and more time giving your customers the experiences they want with your products and company.
(photo by Wrote @ Flickr CC)
Technorati tags: customer experience, customer-centric, experience centric, business, strategy, marketing
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Mar
03
2009
Empower Your Employees to Help Your Customers
Yesterday Jason Falls over at Social Media Explorer wrote a post about whether brands were playing favorites on social media. The problem is that many customers have problems, but often it seems that people who are influencers – who have a popular blog or twitter feed – will get responses from companies that normal people can’t seem to get through normal customer support channels. I commented that right now many of the people monitoring social media at companies are higher up and actually have the power to fix problems.
Why is this exactly? Why do people have to complain on Twitter or their blog or to their influencer friends to get their problems solved? Most of us have had an experience with a customer support system where the employee had to follow a script and wasn’t allowed to make any kind of decision. You usually have to try to get up to a manager or another department and even then there’s no guarantee that you’ll get any kind of decision.
What would happen if you allowed your customer support employees to make decisions? You’d have to provide them with some guidelines, obviously, but what if they could actually help your customers? Many years ago I used to work a few hours a week at Bed, Bath & Beyond (ok, mostly for the discount). They allowed their employees to give up to a 5% discount to any customer for any reason (usually having to do with a flaw in the merchandise). Do you know how happy it makes a customer when they come up to you to show you a flaw in a product, ready for a fight, and you just give them a 5% discount without arguing? How many of those customers were repeat customers? I’d imagine quite a few. I’m sure BBB made up the 5% discount with increased sales from happy customers.
All the employees at your company will influence your brand and reputation. If you give them the power to make decisions that help customers, it will only help your company in the long run.
(photo by dan taylor @ FlickrCC)
Technorati tags: brand, brand reputation, brand strategy, business, customer service, customer-centric, customer support, marketing, strategy
Feb
26
2009
What were they expecting?
Succeed at managing your customers expectation and you can never fail. Fail to manage your customers expectations and you can never succeed. ~ me
This is one of my all time favorite universal lessons I have gleaned from business. There isn’t really any part of my life that involves other people which doesn’t benefit from the practiced art of managing the expectations of those I’m interacting with. When another human knows exactly what they can expect from you, on your terms, and when you consistently meet or beat that expectation on their terms, you have set the stage for a powerful ally in business; trust.
The reason this is so important is because people on a whole are very self-referential, which means they see their own perceptions and actions within the conversations and interactions they have with other people. Imagine two people talking business over lunch. The speaker could say ‘it will be a short project that we can deliver with limited resources and for a reasonable amount of money’. The listener will build context around the statements with their own assumptions, drawn from their own experiences of what is short, limited and reasonable, that will ultimately create very different picture than the speaker meant to convey. At that moment, an expectation was set in the mind of the client that may or may not be ironed out in the contract negotiations but will greatly influence the customers satisfaction when the project is completed.
I worked with a fantastic colleague on the team that had a very bad habit of responding to challenging technical requests with an automatic ‘Not sure yet, but that should be doable’. What he meant to deliver was ‘It SHOULD be doable, but of course I won’t know until I work on it” and what the customer heard was “That WILL be EASY and there is no reason it won’t be done on time”. So when said colleague moved heaven and earth to deliver on what turned out to be a very difficult task, the customer was unimpressed. They had already expected it to be done without effort and was maybe a little disappointed that the colleague didn’t work on some of the other, less important features. This is what I would call a ‘Technical win and an Expectation fail‘
Here are some tools and tricks I use when working with other people to help set the expectation
- Pictures and mockups. When you are working in the web industry, their really isn’t an excuse to not mockup what you are seeing in your mind for the customer. A tool I like to use is Balsamiq, which is a Flash based web mockup framework that is quick and easy to use
- Agile Development. The agile process focuses on rapid delivery of code, typically every two weeks, that gives the customer something to wrap their head around. I think Ill do a full post on agile tomorrow
- Closing summaries. When I talk with customers, I have developed a technique of always closing out a conversation by saying ‘So, what I understand you want is…’ and just re-summing everything you’ve been talking about. Etiquette might frown on dragging on a conversation past what the listener wants to endure, but I almost always find mismatching expectations in the closing summaries.
What do you do to manage someone’s expectations?
photo attributed to polandeze
Technorati tags: software, software development, software management, agile, agile development, customer-centric, customer service
Feb
12
2009
Do You Know What Your Customers Don't Know?
This is the question that every business asks themselves (or should) – What do our customers not know? It is vitally important to know the answer to this question because that is the very information you need to have on your website and in your brochures. Potential Customers come to your website to get the answer to their questions.
The hard part is that the question is not the same for everyone. But there are some easy ways to find out what customers want to know. Most obvious and easy is just to ask them. Much of this information is also already known by employees of your company. Anyone who takes sales or support calls will have information about what customers have questions about.
Helping customers answer their questions will lead to higher customer satisfaction and an improved sales process, plus provide you with better content on your website and brochures.
(photo by Andreanna @ Flickr CC)
Technorati tags: business, business strategy, customer service, customer-centric, marketing, strategy
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